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Friday, 31 January 2014

The President of the European Commission (EC), José Manuel Barroso, has
confirmed that Europe is presently in the process of debating a significant
change in its policy towards Cuba.

Speaking recently to journalists in Madrid, Mr Barroso, who is a former
Portuguese Prime Minister, said that the European Union (EU) is discussing the
possibility of modifications to its Cuba policy, and that this will require the
blessing of all of Europe’s 28 member countries.

He also reaffirmed the EU’s long-standing wish for there to be change in Cuba
in relation to human rights, and its continuing desire to see the adoption of
western democratic norms

Although Mr Barroso did not elaborate, his reference was to the likely
agreement when Europe’s Foreign Affairs Council meets on 10 February, to the
Commission’s proposals that Europe negotiate a form of association agreement
with Cuba.

While this will be welcome in Havana and in the Caribbean, taken together with
the US’s slowly evolving policy on Cuba, it should be seen as a signal to
Caribbean governments and the region’s private sector to begin to plan for the
eventual end to the regional economic vacuum that Cuba has been placed in since
1960.

Since late 2012 a draft negotiating mandate has been under consideration and
Cuban officials and the European Commission have with the support of EU members
states been trying, at times with difficulty, to chart a way forward.

In late 2013 one final stumbling block arose that still has to be resolved.
Then, EU permanent representatives postponed consideration of a recommendation
from the European Commission to the Council to authorise a mandate that would
allow the EC to open negotiations for a political dialogue and a co-operation
agreement with Cuba.

The delay reflected concerns raised by some EU member states over a technical
legal issue. This relates to whether negotiations, once begun, might under some
circumstances be halted.

The delay meant that any decision on formal adoption by the Council of
Ministers has had to wait until behind the scenes consensus could be achieved
with a small number of concerned member states that are understood to include
Germany and on the matters of principle involved.

Once agreement between member states has been reached, however, negotiations
are expected to proceed.

The European Commission is expected to propose an arrangement in some respects
similar to that signed between Europe and Central American states last year. It
is expected to contain language on political, economic and development matters;
will provide a framework for dialogue on issues of mutual concern; is expected
to enable the provision of development assistance; and may possibly contain
arrangements for asymmetric preferential trade.

Although liberalised trade has not been high on Cuba’s agenda, it is
believed that this could become a component of a future association agreement
as Cuban goods entering the EU have since the start of this year ceased to
benefit from Europe’s Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP), making them less
competitive.

Separately, the EC is understood to have reserved sums in its
development budget for future assistance for Cuba.

The high level confirmation of a change in Europe policy follows from recent
positive statements on the need to improve relations by EU states previously
regarded as taking a hard line on dialogue.

It also coincides with an increasing tendency by EU member states to bypass the
EU’s common position by signing bilateral agreements and memoranda of
understanding with Havana that facilitate broad based exchanges on issues from
trade to counter-narcotics interdiction and cultural exchange.

The EC President’s remarks follow comments in Havana in early January by the
Dutch Foreign Minister, Frans Timmermans. The visit, the first by a Dutch
Foreign Minister since the Cuban revolution, involved two-days of high
level exchanges during which he stressed the need for an improvement in the
European Union’s relations with Cuba.

He also signed a broad based bilateral agreement that allows for the
Netherlands and Cuba to engage in political and other consultations.

As such it was one of a small number of such documents signed recently or being
negotiated by EU nations, and marks a further move away from the European
Union’s 1996 Common Position on Cuba, which contains political conditions
unacceptable to Cuba and that until recently, had all but halted exchanges
between Cuba and most EU nations.

Mr Timmermans said that the Netherlands was now particularly interested in
strengthening bilateral links noting the economic transformations underway in
Cuba and the business opportunities this offered. A delegation of businessmen
accompanied him.

He also praised Cuba’s efforts to bring an end to what he described as the last
violent conflict in the region, a reference to Havana’s hosting of peace talks
between the Colombian government and local rebels.

The visit was particularly striking as the Netherlands is a staunch advocate of
human rights and democracy and actively supports dissident organisations in
Cuba.

Mr Timmerman’s visit, like President Barroso’s remarks, coincide with changing
US thinking on Cuba, although the pace at which US exchanges with Cuba on
functional issues will move forward and their breadth is still far from
certain.

Some Europeans suggest that Europe’s interest in an association agreement with
Cuba is being driven by a desire to have an agreement in place before any
improvement take place in US-Cuba relations.

Whether this is true or not, a formal association agreement with Europe would
enable not only a much closer relationship with Cuba but also mean that the EU
would have reached agreement with the only Latin American and Caribbean country
with which it has no form of broad based political and economic arrangement.

Recent developments in Europe and the US in relation to Cuba point once again
to the Caribbean needing to consider carefully how it will respond to the
possibility that a neighbour and friend may slowly emerge as a competitor after
a long period of economic isolation.

David Jessop is the Director of the Caribbean Council and can be contacted at
david.jessop@caribbean-council.org

Friday, 24 January 2014

Twenty-five years ago, on 27 June 1988, the army of
apartheid South Africa was forced to start withdrawing from Angola after 13
years’ intervention in that country’s civil war. The South Africans had been
outmanoeuvred and outgunned by the Angolan defence forces (FAPLA – the People’s
Armed Forces for the Liberation of Angola), in combination with thousands of
Cuban soldiers, and units from both the MK (uMkhonto weSizwe – the armed wing
of the ANC) and PLAN (People’s Liberation Army of Namibia – the armed wing of
the South West African People’s Organisation).

The four-month battle between
the SADF and the Cuban-Angolan force at Cuito Cuanavale was, to use the words
of Nelson Mandela, “the turning point for the liberation of Africa from the
scourge of apartheid.”

BackgroundCuba’s assistance to post-colonial Angola started in
1975, just a few days after the independence celebrations on 11 November
(Angola won its independence from Portugal in the aftermath of the Portuguese
Revolution of 1974). At the time, three different Angolan political-military
movements were struggling for supremacy: the MPLA (Popular Movement for the
Liberation of Angola), UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of
Angola) and the FNLA (National Front for the Liberation of Angola).

The most
radical, most popular and best organised of these groups was the MPLA, which
had the support of most of the socialist countries. The FNLA was allied with
the pro-imperialist Mobutu dictatorship in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic
of Congo), and UNITA was collaborating with the US, white-supremacist South
Africa and the representatives of the old colonial order.

As Fidel Castro noted at the time: “The Soviet Union and all the countries of
Eastern Europe support the MPLA; the revolutionary movements of Mozambique and
Guinea-Bissau support the MPLA; the majority of the nonaligned nations support
the MPLA. In Angola, the MPLA represents the progressive cause of the world.”
(Speech given in Havana to the first contingent of military instructors leaving
for Angola, 12 September 1975)

South Africa, faced with the prospect of pro-socialist,
anti-racist, anti-colonial, independent states in Angola and Mozambique (plus a
rising independence movement in its colony of South West Africa – now Namibia),
decided to intervene militarily in Angola on the side of UNITA. The SADF
entered Angola from Namibia on 14 October 1975, and the MPLA’s army, FAPLA, was
in no position to stop its advance. It was, writes Piero Gleijeses, “a poor
man’s war. South of Luanda there were only weak FAPLA units, badly armed and
poorly trained. They were strong enough to defeat UNITA, but were no match for
the South Africans” (‘Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa,
1959-1976′).

South Africa’s invasion, along with the continued
threat and provocations by Mobutu’s Zaire, caused Fidel Castro and the leading
commanders in Cuba to understand that Angola needed urgent help. In
mid-November 1975, several hundred Cuban soldiers boarded two planes for
Angola. Over the course of the next 13 years, nearly 400,000 Cubans volunteered
in Angola, mostly as soldiers but also as doctors, nurses, teachers and
advisers.

With Cuban assistance (and with the help of Soviet
advisers and weaponry), the Angolans drove the SADF troops back across the
border, and for the next decade or so South Africa focused its efforts in Angola
around destabilisation, providing significant financial and logistical support
for UNITA, thereby extending a brutal civil war that caused the deaths of
hundreds of thousands of Angolan civilians.

The
Battle of Cuito CuanavaleAs long as Angola was embroiled in bitter civil war,
it was not a major threat to apartheid control of South Africa or Namibia. But
in mid-1987, FAPLA – with the help of Soviet and Cuban forces – launched a
major offensive against UNITA. This offensive had the potential to finally
bring an end to the civil war – an outcome that neither South Africa nor the US
could accept.

Ronnie Kasrils notes that the situation “could not
have been graver. Cuito could have been overrun then and there by the SADF,
changing the strategic situation overnight. The interior of the country would
have been opened up to domination by UNITA, with Angola being split in half.

This was something Pretoria and [UNITA leader Jonas] Savimbi had been aiming at
for years.”

The Cubans moved decisively in support of their
African allies. Fidel decided that more Cuban troops must be sent immediately,
boosting the total number in Angola to over 50,000.

Cuito Cuanavale was defended by 6,000 Cuban and
Angolan troops, using sophisticated Soviet weaponry that had been rushed to the
front.

The SADF had been convinced that its 9,000 elite troops – in addition to
several thousand UNITA fighters – would be able to conquer Cuito and thereby
inflict a major defeat on MPLA, and indeed the progressive forces of the whole
region. But Cuito held out over the course of four months, in what has been
described as the biggest battle on African soil since World War II (Greg Mills
and David Williams, Seven Battles that Shaped South Africa, 2006).

Kasrils
notes: “All the South African attempts to advance were pushed back. Their
sophisticated long-range artillery kept bombing day and night. But it didn’t
frighten the Angolan-Cuban forces and turned out to be ineffective.”

With the South African stranglehold at Cuito
Cuanavale broken by the end of March 1988, the Cuban-Angolan forces launched a
major offensive in the south-west of the country. This offensive is what Castro
had intended from the start: to tie South Africa down with pitched battles at
Cuito (several hundred kilometres from its nearest bases in occupied Namibia)
and then launch a ferocious, dynamic attack to drive South Africa out of Angola
once and for all, “like a boxer who with his left hand blocks the blow and with
his right – strikes“.

Castro noted: “While in Cuito Cuanavale the South African
troops were bled, to the south-west 40,000 Cuban and 30,000 Angolan troops,
supported by some 600 tanks, hundreds of pieces of artillery, a thousand
anti-aircraft weapons and the daring MiG-23 units that secured air supremacy
advanced towards the Namibian border, ready literally to sweep up the South
African forces deployed along that main route.” (Cited in Vladimir Shubin ‘The
Hot “Cold War”‘)

Kasrils writes: “The end for the SADF was signaled
on June 27 1988. A squadron of MiGs bombed the Ruacana and Calueque
installations, cutting the water supply to Ovamboland and its military bases
and killing 11 young South African conscripts. A MiG-23 executed a neat victory
roll over the Ruacana dam. The war was effectively over.”

The supposedly invincible South African Defence
Force had been forced out of Angola. The apartheid regime was left with no
choice but to sue for peace.

Turning
point for southern AfricaFidel stated that “the history of Africa will be
written as before and after Cuito Cuanavale”. Nelson Mandela is on record as
saying that Cuito Cuanavale was “the turning point for the liberation of Africa
from the scourge of apartheid”. What made a battle in the Angolan war the major
turning point for the wider southern African region?

Isaac Saney explains in his excellent book ‘Cuba: A
Revolution in Motion’: “The defeat shattered the confidence of the South
African military, and with the approach of Cuban forces toward Namibia,
Pretoria sought a means by which to extricate their troops ‘without humiliation
and alive’.

Thus, the Battle of Cuito Cuanavale was instrumental in paving the
path to negotiations. In December 1988, an agreement was reached between Cuba
and Angola on one side and South Africa on the other, which provided for the
gradual withdrawal of Cuban troops from Angola and the establishment of an
independent Namibia”.

So, as part of the negotiation process resulting
from the Cuban-Angolan victory, South Africa was forced to set a timetable for
withdrawal from Namibia. Namibia became an independent state in March 1990. The
victory in Angola also provided important impetus for the anti-apartheid forces
within South Africa. In early 1990, Nelson Mandela was released from prison
after 27 long years, the ANC and other liberation organisations were unbanned,
and the negotiations towards a free South Africa were begun in earnest. UNITA
suffered a series of major military reverses and Angola was able to start
pursuing a course of peaceful progress.

These were all extraordinary
developments that nobody could have predicted a few years’ earlier.

Not
a proxy cold war but an epic battle between the forces of imperialism and the
forces of progressIt has been suggested by several western historians
that the war in Angola was, at heart, an extension of the so-called Cold War
between the two superpowers of the day (the USA and the USSR) with South Africa
acting on behalf of the USA and Cuba acting on behalf of the USSR. Such an
analysis is wholly refuted by the facts; its only purpose is to place a moral
equivalency between imperialism and socialism.

For one thing, Cuba has tended to maintain a high
degree of political independence in spite of close relations with the Soviet
Union. In Angola, it is well documented that the Soviets were surprised by the
sudden arrival – in both 1975 and 1987 – of large numbers of Cuban soldiers.
Kasrils writes that the US security services were “surprised to discover that
the Soviet Union’s so-called proxy had not even consulted Moscow over Havana’s
massive intervention. They were even more taken aback when sophisticated Soviet
military equipment was rushed to Angola to supply the Cuban reinforcements.”

Even the arch-reactionary Henry Kissinger, who was
among the leading ‘hawks’ in relation to US Angola policy at the time,
admitted: “At the time, we thought Castro was operating as a Soviet surrogate.
We could not imagine that he would act so provocatively so far from home unless
he was pressured by Moscow to repay the Soviet Union for its military and economic
support. Evidence now available suggests that the opposite was the case.”
(Cited in ‘Conflicting Missions’)

The
continuing relevance and necessity of revolutionary internationalismWhy is it important to remember Cuito Cuanavale?
Because it represents a pinnacle of revolutionary internationalism, of
solidarity between peoples struggling for freedom. As Nelson Mandela said,
speaking at a huge rally in Havana in July 1991:

“The Cuban internationalists have made a
contribution to African independence, freedom and justice unparalleled for its
principled and selfless character… We in Africa are used to being victims of
countries wanting to carve up our territory or subvert our sovereignty. It is
unparalleled in African history to have another people rise to the defence of
one of us.”

Cuba’s actions in Angola were driven by a deep sense
of social justice and revolutionary duty. One of the historical forces driving
its actions was the depth of African roots in Cuban society. Fidel, speaking
shortly after the departure of the first few hundred troops to Angola,
explained: “African blood flows freely through our veins. Many of our ancestors
came as slaves from Africa to this land. As slaves they struggled a great deal.

They fought as members of the Liberating Army of Cuba. We’re brothers and
sisters of the people of Africa and we’re ready to fight on their behalf!” This
dynamic is reflected in the name that was given to the operation: ‘Carlota’ –
in honour of the heroic Afro-Cuban female slave who led an uprising near
Matanzas in 1843 and who, upon her capture, was drawn and quartered by Spanish
colonial troops.

Raúl Castro pointed out that Cuba had itself
benefitted massively from revolutionary international solidarity and thus felt
morally compelled to extend the same type of solidarity to others. “We must not
forget another deep motivation. Cuba itself had already lived through the
beautiful experience of the solidarity of other peoples, especially the people
of the Soviet Union, who extended a friendly hand at crucial moments for the
survival of the Cuban Revolution.

The solidarity, support, and fraternal
collaboration that the consistent practice of internationalism brought us at
decisive moments created a sincere feeling, a consciousness of our debt to
other peoples who might find themselves in similar circumstances.” Fidel
emphasises this point: “As we have said before, being internationalists is
paying our debt to humanity.

Those who are incapable of fighting for others
will never be capable of fighting for themselves. And the heroism shown by our
forces, by our people in other lands, faraway lands, must also serve to let the
imperialists know what awaits them if one day they force us to fight on this
land here.”

Further
Reading

How
Far we slaves have come
Read the speeches that Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro gave when Mandela
visited Cuba shortly after his release. Available from the CSC shop priced £8.50 inc
p&p

Cuba and Angola: Fighting for Africa’s freedom and our own (pictured above)Charts the Cuban involvement in helping Angola
achieve independence with contributions from the Miami Five about their experiences
there.Available from the CSC shop
priced £10 including p&p